Free Press, $?, 1994, ISBN#0-02-923405-0, 527 pages

I usually take at least one spin around the dealer’s area at each convention to say hello to friends and to see what they’re selling. I took such a spin at Fall In at the Maryland State fairgrounds and found a vendor selling a few books for $10 each. I have to admit that historical biographies are not my normal fare, but the title of this book caught my attention and Professor Oates’ forward reeled me in.

A Woman of Valor is the story of the Civil War through the eyes of Clara Barton. It is an absolutely fascinating account because it is told by a woman, who was on the battlefield, and also because this woman, born in 1822, defied all conventions of her time in order to be on that battlefield.

Clara was by no means an “average” woman in her time. She idolized her father, who was a soldier, and wanted to follow in his footsteps. She was well educated, attending a co-educational academy in 1850. While the youngest of five children, after her mother died, she was the one who tended to her father, siblings, nieces, and nephews when they were sick. She worked at the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C. when the Civil War began and set out to find a role for herself in the conflict. And she immediately began to distinguish herself.

Clara’s motto should have been “just do it!” She would identify a need and then set off to fill it. Early on, she organized women’s aid societies to supply blankets, bandages, and food that was sorely lacking for the soldiers on the battlefield. Soon she began to go to the regiments in the field to deliver the supplies. She was a prolific writer, keeping a journal and sending letters to friends, women’s aid societies, newspapers, and politicians to report on the conditions she’d observed in the field. She was at every major battle during the War, working on the battlefield side by side with the surgeons and in the field hospitals ministering to the wounded and the sick. She was never officially given a title or paid for her work, and spent the small stipend she continued to receive from the patent office to buy needed supplies for the men.

The descriptions of the conditions at the field hospitals are amazingly graphic and gruesome. It is well know that disease and infection claimed almost as many lives as the war itself. With the descriptions of horrific conditions, the treatments meant to heal that killed instead, and in some cases lack of food and water for those who were injured, one is left wondering how anyone survived.

Throughout this remarkable woman’s life, she encountered men who refused to acknowledge her contribution, and men and women who tried to diminish her role or take credit for her work. Her frustration is palpable. I found myself identifying with her and marveling that a woman’s complaints from 180 years ago are not much different than those of woman today.

Stephen B. Oates is a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. According to his Afterward and Acknowledgements, he not only reviewed historical sources but also several others to get a flavor for writing a woman’s biography and for understanding a woman’s thoughts and experiences. The richness of Clara Barton’s letters and journal entries combined with Oates' research and writing have resulted in a biography that places you in the story, and lets you see and experience the Civil War through the eyes of an incredible woman.

Oates' Foreword (pgs ix-x)

If in this portrait of Clara Barton in the Civil War, I have referred to her as Clara, because that is how she was known to her family and riends. Calling her Barton makes her seem cold and distant, when she was anything but that: in the company of people she liked, she exuded a special warmth and had a relaxed informality about her. She was Clara. And this is the story of her Civil War, the war in the battlefield hospi­tals-now a bullet-ridden farmhouse, now a crumbling mansion, now a windblown tent-where she served as nurse, relief worker, and surro­gate mother or sister, wife or sweetheart, to her "dear boys" who lay sick, wounded, and dying by her side. The Civil War was the defining event in Clara's life, shaping who she was and what she became. It gave her the opportunity as a woman to reach out and seize control of her destiny.

It is one of the most compelling stories I have ever encountered in all my years as a writer. It has a tragic national context, a sympathetic and original lead character, a wartime love affair with a married officer, powerful friendships and complex family ties, a sometimes antagonistic medical bureaucracy, obdurate male and female adversaries, plenty of battlefield action seen from a unique perspective, and a compelling plot: a passionate, driven, conflicted woman who overcomes "the fearful odds" against her, invades a man's domain, and helps change it dramati­cally.

To tell the story of Clara's Civil War, I have drawn heavily on the Clara Barton manuscripts, a good many of them never used before. Because Clara was in the storm, because she served near the battlefield of Second Bull Run, on the battlegrounds of Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Battery Wagner, and near the front during the Wilderness campaign and the siege lines of Petersburg and Richmond, I have tried to depict her in the swirling chaos of battle, to give some sense of what she experienced there and how it affected her, and to describe her important contributions to the Union war effort and to the liberation of her sex. This is, of course, a work of narrative nonfiction. Using authenticated details, I have tried to evoke Clara's wartime experiences through graphic scenes and images. I have tried to recreate a living woman in a living world, to simulate what it was like "to be there" with her as the war unfolded.

How I came to write A Woman of Valor is a story in itself. For the past several years I have worked on a sweeping biographical history of the entire Civil War epoch, one that attempts to capture it through the intersecting lives of a dozen central characters. One of them was Clara Barton. Always fiercely independent, a dedicated loner, she refused to remain in my lineup. Every time I wrote something about her in con­junction with my other figures, I had the sensation that she was trying hard to keep me from knowing and understanding her She would float into my consciousness without a face, for example, or give me the strange feeling that she was hiding from me somewhere in my study, or had just bolted out the door.

At one point my computer abruptly mal­functioned and started throwing out an entire body of information­ several months worth of work on Jefferson Davis. Nothing I punched on the keyboard could stop the machine from its insane mission to erace every trace of the Confederate president from its memory. All I could do was watch in despair. At first I blamed this on Davis's own stubborn pride, as if he were saying, "You're not putting me in a book with Lincoln or any other hated Yankee!" Later I decided it was Clara again, trying to sabotage my project in an effort to get out of it.

Finally, sub­mitting to her superior will, I put the biographical work aside and set out to write Clara's Civil War story by itself-and on a new computer, I might add. After that, she cooperated fully. I was helped to my decision by the remarkable details, so many of them never before published, that I kept discovering in the Clara Barton archives. Now I have told the story Clara wanted me to tell, speaking in an empathetic voice that attempts to understand and capture her in all her complexity, all her humanity. I hope she is not too disappointed with the result.

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